Word: wouk
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Before graduation, Wouk had announced that he was going to be a writer. His sister Irene still remembers the family powwows that ensued: "Father said if Herman wanted to write, why not write advertising copy for the Fox Square Laundry? Mother twisted her apron in anguish and insisted that he go to law school." (Years later proud Mama Wouk was seen carrying The Caine Mutiny almost everywhere she went...
...Next, Wouk went to work (at $15 a week) for a cigar-chomping "czar of gagwriters" who ran a joke factory supplying gags to Fanny Brice, Lou Holtz, Eddie Cantor et al. Wouk's job was to clip and card-index old jokes and to clean up the off-color items. Two years later he was hired as a radio gagwriter by Fred Allen. His special chore for the Allen-program: the "People You Didn't Expect to Meet" interview, for which he unearthed weirdies, e.g., a goldfish doctor, a worm salesman and "the man who inserts...
...Greatest Experience. Though he was making $200 a week during the depths of The Depression, squiring showgirls around town and living in a swank apartment at Manhattan's Essex House, Wouk began to feel that "gags were not the answer to the riddle of existence." He talked to his grandfather, and put his probings into a diary (he still keeps it, so far has filled 20 volumes-6,000 pages). When Pearl Harbor came, Wouk enlisted in the Navy. At midshipman's school he graduated in the top 20 in a class of 500, further distinguished himself...
...Wouk, the wartime Navy was "the greatest experience of my life ... I had known two worlds, the wise guys of Broadway and the wise guys of Columbia-two small worlds that sometimes take themselves for the whole world. In the Navy, I found out more than I ever had about people and about the United States. I had always been a word boy, and suddenly I had to cope with the peculiar, marvelous world of the machine...
...Love with the Boss. Unlike the Caine, the destroyer-minesweeper Zane, to which Wouk was assigned, swept mines aplenty-off the Marshalls, Kwajalein, Eniwetok, the Marianas, Guam, Saipan, Tinian. In two years Wouk was successively assistant communications officer, communications officer, ship's first lieutenant and navigator. Later he was reassigned to another minesweeper, the Southard, saw action in six Pacific campaigns. He rose to executive officer, had been recommended to become captain of his ship when it was wrecked in a typhoon at Okinawa...